Crimson Desert looks a lot more ordinary running on a regular PS5

Suspicions around Crimson Desert had been building for a while. Pearl Abyss's action-adventure – a spin-off from 2016's Black Desert Online – generated enormous hype off the back of stunning PC footage, but sharp-eyed observers kept noticing the same thing: there was never any console gameplay to be seen. Now, just two days before the March 19 launch, 20 minutes of footage running on a regular PS5 has surfaced, and the reason for the silence is pretty clear. Not because it looks bad – but because it looks decidedly ordinary.

Earlier, Digital Foundry put the bullshot theory to rest by getting footage directly from the developers, with full hardware specs and settings on the table. The game really did look as jaw-dropping as Pearl Abyss's own clips. The machine was powerful, everything cranked to Ultra, the visuals genuinely breathtaking – though the GPU, while not budget hardware, was four years old. Still, console specs remained a mystery.

The PS5 footage came via Sony's Japanese Play Play Play channel. Calling the game bad would be unfair – it looks like a perfectly fine PS5 game. It just doesn't look anything like the PC clips that sent the internet into a frenzy.

Making things worse, Sony uploaded the video at 1080p for reasons no one can explain, and YouTube's compression at that resolution does the image no favors. It's entirely possible the game looks noticeably sharper in person.

Worth keeping in mind that this console generation is over five years old, and this is exactly the point in the cycle where the gap between PC and console hardware becomes impossible to paper over. It's a frustrating stretch for console owners watching their machines age while PC players keep swapping parts – but it's not a new phenomenon.

What's harder to defend is keeping the console version hidden until days before launch – a lesson CD Projekt RED learned at enormous reputational cost six years ago. That said, this footage doesn't suggest a disaster, just a more modest-looking game for console players. If the gameplay holds up to the hype from previews, that shouldn't be a dealbreaker. Though given how hard the visuals were being sold, it's still a bit of a letdown.